“Looks like I pissed off the internet”

A friend messages me: “is that you on the picture? I found this on Hacker News”

„Haha, hey, that’s me indeed!” … „Wait, wtf”

TL;DR: I don’t fancy being used as a Bad Example and an advertisement for your Brilliant Startup. Also, using somebody’s picture without permission and censoring his comment is Not Very Nice.

After readinng the article linked above I left the following comment below:

> You guys need help getting dressed in the morning so you don’t leave the house in a Hackathon shirt and cargo pants.

Oh, how convincing: fetch my picture from the hackathon and tell me to not dress as if I was dressing for a hackathon. Nice.

As somebody pointed out already, it may be nice to ask for someone’s permission before publishing a picture in this context, especially since the original website, from where I believe you took that picture from, has my name is written down below the image. Oh by the way, ISTR it had a watermark as well, just outside the frame you included; it’s very nice of you to not credit the photographer who values his work.

As far as I like the idea of helping geeks (please, no “nerds”. Respecting each other is not _that_ hard) to dress better, your “advertisment” is not particularly sophisticated. I hope that the rest your ideas are more interesting than this one.

For some reason the comment didn’t make it through moderation. Whoops. So I took the liberty to respond to the post on my own blog.

Now that I read this I think I could’ve reacted in a less angry way (although it was still not „the internet angry”, as a friend of mine pointed out), but the points stand.

So, a little backstory: On the Perl 6 hackathon in Oslo there was a picture taken with all the participants, myself included. A strictly programming event, who would be surprised that people would be wearing t-shirts from previous conferences? Apparently somebody would, and thus will use us as an example of guys who „need help”.

That’s not very nice.

Disregarding the legal aspects of publishing a picture of people, after carefully removing the watermark, and portraying them as anti-social and helpless, I find it hard to imagine how an advertising of this sort could appeal to the very same people you’re targeting with your post. Apparently, reading the comments which did make it through moderation, some people included on the pictures actually liked the idea, so it may just be that I know nothing about marketing. My bad.

A few hours after posting the article to hacker news, @jordynclee posted on her twitter: “Looks like I pissed off the internet”. Woo, how did that happen? Mayhaps insulting people whose photos you use without their permission is not the best idea of all?

Now, dear @jordynclee, I’ll continue on listening to opinions of people who respect other people, and keep on doing business which doesn’t involve ridiculing others to achieve my goals. Thank you for your constructive criticism.